Oligopeptide induction of a cytotoxic T lymphocyte response to HER-2/neu proto-oncogene in vitro.

The HER-2/neu proto-oncogene (HER-2) encodes a transmembrane protein whose expression is enhanced in a number of breast and ovarian tumors and correlates with tumor aggressiveness. Because of its expression on normal epithelial cells, HER-2 can be defined as a tumor associated antigen and is of interest as a target of a therapeutic anti-tumor T cell response. To investigate whether oligopeptides analogs of HER-2 isolated from a likely target area of T cells can induce an anti-tumor CTL response, peripheral blood mononuclear cells were stimulated in vitro with HER-2 synthetic peptides. CTL cultures generated recognized peptides used as immunogen. A CD3+CD8+CD4- line isolated from these cultures lysed HLA-A2+, HER-2+ ovarian tumors but not natural killer target K562 cells, and showed significantly higher lysis of HER-2high than of HER-2low ovarian tumors. This lysis was inhibited by HER-2 peptide-pulsed HLA-A2+ targets, suggesting that similar epitopes are presented on tumor cells associated with HLA-A2. The observation that peptide analogs of a proto-oncogene can induce CTL in vitro which express tumor lysis dependent on the levels of expression of HER-2 is novel for human tumor systems. Targeting by T cells of HER-2 may prove useful for understanding the mechanisms of recognition, tolerance, and therapeutic use of human tumor reactive T cells.

Sequence motifs of human her-2 protooncogene important for Peptide binding to hla-A2.

Tumor progression and metastasis are often associated with overexpression of specific cellular proteins. In 1991, we introduced a hypothesis that epitopes of nonmutated overexpressed proteins can be targets of a specific cellular immune response against tumor mediated by T cells (Mol Carcinogen 6: 77-81, 1992) and that, when T cell epitopes are present, distinction between tumor immunity/autoimmunity and unresponsiveness can be predicated on the protein concentration as a limiting factor of epitope supply. In support of this hypothesis, we demonstrated that CTL from patients with ovarian tumors which overexpress HER-2 proto-oncogene can recognize both autologous tumor and synthetic analogs of a specific epitope from HER-2, which was identified based on the convergence of all criteria for selection of HLA-A2 associated epitopes recognized by T cells. In this study, we identified all epitopes in HER-2 containing nonapeptides with HLA-A2 anchors. Of these, analysis of potential amphiphilic sites identified both sequences and specific mutations that positively affected the reactivity of conformationally dependent HLA-A2 specific mAb which served as an indication of HER-2 peptide binding. We also report the in vitro induction of cellular responses to these peptides by PBMC from healthy HLA-A2+ volunteers as an indication of their ability to stimulate/ restimulate pre-existing T cell responses to HER-2. The peptides induced proliferative responses in one of four donors tested and CTL responses (one of three peptides tested in two of three donors). This strategy may allow selection of immunogenic HER-2 peptides and elucidation of mechanisms operating in induction of tolerance to defined epitopes on self-proteins.